Steven's guitar box

Steven’s guitar case is the crucial object in his aborted Camden bombing mission, carrying the plan from an intended explosion into a public bomb scare and finally into concealment. Its lightness does not make it harmless: once an apparently matching case is isolated at the station, the object becomes a threat in the eyes of the crowd and an unbearable burden in Steven’s hands. The case’s passage through the scene exposes the gap between an operation imagined as deliberate and controlled and the disorder it unleashes.

A Case Chosen for the Mission

In the account of the group’s selection of Steven, he is described as the one they had chosen, a young man whose set mouth suggested lethal purpose and who was said to have the blood for the work. The plan required a guitar case: when Steven asks whether the action is for the following week, Manus answers that he can try, then identifies the case as the problem. The exchange makes the object an immediate practical obstacle within an already chosen course of action, rather than a neutral accessory.

Manus’s advice is to strike the case against a wall, since, he says, it will make no difference and the woman will leave when she is going to leave. His casual formulation offers a test of the case’s supposed importance, but it does not resolve Steven’s attachment to it. The object remains with him as the plan approaches its appointed hour.

The Planned Placement

On Sunday morning at eleven, Steven walks along Tottenham Court Road carrying the case. He reflects that calling the operation the mainland campaign is the greatest insult: the label raises the question of what the people who use it consider themselves to be. The case is described as light as air, a physical detail that sharply contrasts with the lethal meaning attached to it by the mission.

The placement is set for one o’clock. Steven expects to leave the case at the designated spot and meet a woman outside at half past twelve, precisely on time by his estimation of a German. He imagines that they could be in Regent’s Park by the time the device goes off, and that she would have her new boots. As he walks north towards Camden, in a hot, dusty morning, his intention hardens. The plan’s timetable thus holds two futures together: a timed detonation and a date that Steven hopes to continue as though it were separate from the attack.

The Camden Bomb Scare

Near the station, a Metropolitan Police response unit appears at the top of the elevator. Half a dozen officers in riot gear have a young goth between them, his arms twisted. The crowd’s repeated cries of “Bomb” turn the station into a scene of panic; the goth is pinned down, the station is cordoned off, and crowds spill onto the street. A guitar case carried by the goth is isolated for bomb disposal.

The discovery does not identify Steven, but it makes his own case newly conspicuous in the story’s chain of events. The narrative notes that his match for the profile in the surrounding giddiness goes unnoticed. Instead of leaving the case at its planned location, he walks the length of the High Street again and then follows the canal west. He finds a quiet place beneath a bridge and hangs the case over the railing, yet cannot let go. The case has changed from a tool he was meant to deposit into something he cannot relinquish, even when he has reached a place where he might abandon it.

Concealment and Aftermath

A man sprawled on the far side of the canal calls out in an Irish accent, remarking that guitars are hard to learn. The comment lands beside the case’s disguise as an ordinary musical possession, while the case itself remains in Steven’s grip. Steven returns along the path, waits for an unseen moment in the Sunday crowd, and sneaks it behind a bookstall on the Lock. This is not the planned placement: after the police response and his failed attempt to let the case go, concealment becomes the action he can manage.

He is only ten minutes late to meet the woman. She looks as good in daylight, and he says Camden is giving him a headache and suggests taking a bus. She laughs and seems taken with him; they go to Hampstead to see Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire at the repertory cinema, waiting in a coffee shop among other young people dressed in black. The case is absent from this date but not resolved: the scene establishes that Steven has hidden it, while offering no account here of what happens to it afterward. Its role is therefore defined by an interrupted trajectory—from intended bomb, to apparent bomb in a panicked crowd, to an object Steven cannot abandon and ultimately conceals—rather than by any confirmed explosion.